The Greatest Threat to Europe

Posted by on Feb 13, 2014 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Human Rights | 0 comments This year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. Today, Europe has left war behind. In place of jostling empires, there is the European Union, a modern family beset by the usual bickering but nothing that a smothering bureaucracy can’t handle. Even Sarajevo, where the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked world conflict in 1914 and a ghastly siege claimed...
read more

The Color Wars

Posted by on Feb 6, 2014 in Articles, Asia, Featured, Human Rights | 0 comments I played for Green when I was growing up. That was my soccer team. We were divided up by color: Green vs. Red, Gold vs. Blue. The teams were chosen at random, but we became fiercely attached to our color. Friendships across color lines became strained. We talked of “Purple power” and the “Gold tradition.” For all I know, the league was run by psychologists testing the influence of...
read more

The Twilight of Leadership

Posted by on Dec 12, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights | 0 comments With the death of South African leader Nelson Mandela, many have mourned the passing of a brave activist, a far-sighted statesman, and a compelling moral force in the fallen world of global politics. His passing has touched hundreds of millions of people around the world. They are grieving his death, of course. But they may also be lamenting something much bigger: not just the passing of a...
read more

Competitive Suffering

Posted by on Jul 10, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Human Rights, Korea | 0 comments I was nearly at the end of a presentation on the North Korean prison camp system, when the last person in the audience grasped the microphone to ask a question. His question was so unexpected that I was literally blindsided. Up to that point, I’d already described the conditions inside North Korea’s prison camps as “odious” and “systematic,” which qualified them as a crime against...
read more

Serbia’s Future: Back to the Past?

Posted by on Nov 14, 2012 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Human Rights, Uncategorized | 10 comments The war in Yugoslavia began as a conflict over state structure. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nationalist movements in the republics championed greater autonomy only to be suppressed in turn by Tito, who then went on to incorporate many of their demands in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic signaled his intentions to assert Serbian dominance within the federation...
read more

Reading Del Ponte in Croatia

Posted by on Oct 17, 2012 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Human Rights | 1 comment Carla del Ponte’s memoir of her time as the chief prosecutor of the two major international tribunals – on Yugoslavia and Rwanda – is basically a tedious book. It can be summed up in a single sentence: she fought tooth and nail against stubborn national leaders, indifferent UN bureaucrats, and elusive war criminals, and although they all put up their “rubber wall” (muro di gomma), she...
read more